Needles & Bread

To see Chelsea today!

Creative Copy Challenge #105. These are too much fun:

We met years ago at a Hungarian restaurant. Back when his daughter was in preschool and I was living off a small inheritance trying to write poetry. The restaurant was where that coffee shop you like is now. The one with too many choices and fruit smoothies.
 
He was fastidious. His napkin neatly folded across his lap. Always in half. Always with the crease facing his waist. Knife and fork always neatly balanced on the edge of his coffee cup’s saucer.
 
I was the opposite. Still am. My napkin was always crumpled next to my plate. I was always scrawling bits of poetry in a rumpled little notebook. Always had a stain on my shirt.
 
I’d noticed him before when I would stop in for lunch and coffee. I liked the place. It was quiet – it wasn’t very good – and the coffee was sludgy. He spoke to me for the first time when I broke the little blue coffee cup. Just smashed it to smithereens on the gray tiled floor.
 
You know how I am, never sitting still, always crossing a leg or throwing an elbow around. Something of the sort was going through my limbs and the coffee cup didn’t stand a chance.
 
He moved very precisely, with purpose and intention. He laughed while he helped clean the mess. He was the only other person in the place besides the little waitress. I noticed one of his arms was bent and immobile – like one of those robots from the 1950s. You know. He claimed it was an old injury from when he played polo back when he still lived in Europe. He liked telling the story, always ending with “No pain, no gain.” He liked that saying. I think he thought it was a big joke, him reciting English aphorisms with his foreign tongue.
 
I always remember thinking about how happy he was. I was – still am – the kind who can’t help but worry about the next way I will fail, or have failed. Nervous, twitchy, unsteady, breaking coffee cups. He didn’t worry about failing or going broke or where the money would come from or what was happening at home. I was too intrigued by him to think of his family.
 
He was always demanding a smooch from a waitress or telling tall tales of bar fights and bravado. He always smiled while I always frowned.
 
We spent a few months together while I was still rambling about on paper and in my life. We’d meet at the restaurant to eat and drink coffee, we’d jaunt about the city at night. Then he stopped showing up. I only knew his first name and while everyone remembered him, no one really knew anything about him either.
 
If he wasn’t dead then, I’m sure he’s dead now. He was a good decade or so older than me and I’m sure he never slowed down. I’m glad I never found out what happened to him. Never tried. I like remembering myself as his only friend for a time.

I want to remember to make this later!

twodadscook:

Nothing beats back the chill of a December afternoon like a toasty mushroom gratin.

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